


Offender

by quiet_wraith



Series: Categories of Depuration [4]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of the Rebellion, Bittersweet Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Soldiers, District 2 (Hunger Games), District 8 (Hunger Games), District 9 (Hunger Games), Gen, Peacekeepers, The Capitol, War Crimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:48:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25444180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiet_wraith/pseuds/quiet_wraith
Summary: What happens when you take a stand and end up unwittingly digging yourself in deeper? Do you continue fighting for what is right, or do you give in? For Carl Surje, the answer is obvious. For a Peacekeeper, orders are orders, and that’s that.
Series: Categories of Depuration [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1744570
Comments: 16
Kudos: 10





	Offender

“How do you plead?” the judge demanded.

The child didn’t say a word, looking around the empty courtroom wide-eyed. She tried to move, but she was handcuffed to the bench. She looked confused more than anything. Carl looked away, not wanting to meet her eyes.

“Remember what I told you?” the lawyer whispered to her. The girl nodded.

“Not guilty.”

Judge Lophand looked ready to leap out of his chair and throttle either Dr. Fisher or the child. Carl focused on the ground instead, not wanting to look any of them in the eye. Lophand looked like he really wanted to go home, Dr. Fisher looked ready to start crying, and the child just looked confused.

As the trial began, Carl was fairly certain that this was not how trials were supposed to run. A child of four couldn’t be guilty of spying for a rebel group, it didn’t make any sense. And while the child _had_ crossed the border illegally, she was four! She had had as much choice in the decision as the backpacks her parents had been wearing when they had stepped on a pod in the Capitol boundary. 

Carl didn’t make these decisions, though, so he sat quietly as Lophand - what an appropriate name, half the Capitol laughed about it quietly in their kitchens - listened to Dr. Fisher’s extremely logical arguments with an absent face. Rumour had it that Lophand had never acquitted anyone.

The girl fidgeted on the bench. Carl himself found it almost impossible to sit on the rock-hard wood, how could a child be expected to do it? Her tiny wrists were cuffed almost directly to the bench, with a short chain about ten centimetres long permitting some movement. The fact that handcuffs could be adjusted to fit such a small person seemed like an insult. Carl looked at the floor again, already planning his request to be reassigned. If he asked for a position in the outer Districts, where most of the rebel threat actually was, it would be assumed that he wanted to prove himself in active combat. 

Carl glanced at the lawyer. The man wasn’t old, but his hair was fully white, adding to how completely colourless he looked. He spoke in an uninspiring whisper, no match for the prosecutor’s steely tones. The child started to cry when the prosecutor called her a potentially threatening element. Did she understand the full meaning of the words, or had she just picked up on the emotions? Carl looked out the window, wishing he didn’t have to hear the child testify. What kind of testimony could be expected from a four-year-old?

The trial lasted for an hour, but it felt more like an eternity. Lophand called on the court to rise, and they rose. The girl slipped down from the bench, wrists positioned awkwardly behind her back due to the handcuffs. 

“You are found guilty of illegally crossing a District boundary and the Capitol boundary,” Judge Lophand said, “as well as espionage and subversive activity.” Carl glanced to the side. The child still looked confused. Of course she did. Did a child of four even understand what a trial was, or what it meant to cross a border illegally? Carl raised his eyes, and met Dr. Fisher’s gaze. The drab man had tears in his eyes, and he was looking at Carl with an expression of pure hopelessness.

Lophand pronounced the sentence. “You are sentenced to the Avox condition.” That was a surprise. He had sentenced children that age to death before plenty of times. Maybe Dr. Fisher’s mumbling had had some sort of effect after all. Looking annoyed about something, Lophand got up and stormed out of the courtroom.

Dr. Fisher was discreetly wiping at his face now. He patted the child on the shoulder as Carl unlocked the child’s cuffs, attaching one to his own wrist and leaving the other hand free. “Go with the nice Peacekeeper, alright?” the lawyer said. The child nodded, not saying a word. “It was very nice to spend time with you, Maria. I hope I-” he cut off, biting back highly politically dangerous sobs. The child, Maria, hugged him with her free hand. “I’ll see you again soon, alright?” Dr. Fisher said in a thick voice, patting the child on her head. As Carl walked with the child out of the courtroom, he heard the lawyer start to cry openly. 

The sentence would be carried out immediately. During the entire van ride to the National Committee for Internal Affairs, the child didn’t say a word. She didn’t even look up from the floor. Carl tried not to look at her, which was difficult, as she was handcuffed to him. Weren’t children supposed to be talkative?

An assignment to the Capitol was supposed to be the easiest job imaginable, but Carl wished he was somewhere in the middle of nowhere instead.

The child didn’t say a word when Carl led her to the basements of the building. The proper forms were checked, and she was led to a small room with a contoured chair and uncuffed. “Sit in the chair,” Carl said in the most emotionless tone he could muster. Reluctantly, the child obeyed, and Carl gently restrained her limbs with the soft straps attached to the chair. Then, he walked out without another word, the door quietly closing behind him as the surgical team began their task.

* * *

“Really?” the middle-aged Peacekeeper asked. “You _applied_ to go to Nine when you had a cushy Capitol job?”

Carl shrugged. “I didn’t like the people.”

The other Peacekeeper laughed. Tan and weathered, she looked like the stereotype of an outer District Peacekeeper. “You think the people out here are any better?” she asked, gesturing to the cluster of shabby old people gathered outside the even shabbier garage. “We’ve just caught a Rebel.” Carl wanted to scream. “Yes, really, out here in the middle of nowhere. Nice welcome for you, huh? At least the drink will be good.”

“Am I seriously going to have to-” Carl felt sick. He wanted to beg off and say he was tired from the trip, but he didn’t want his new comrades to think he was weak. This was an outer District, after all.

The other Peacekeeper laughed. “New guy gets the shit job.”

That was how Carl found himself aiming a gun at a terrified young man. “Please!” the youth screamed. “Please, don’t, I swear I won’t do it again, I have a family, I was just upset because our seed grain was confiscated, please-”

“Fire!”

Since the man was being executed by firing squad, Carl simply aimed to miss. A painfully loud cacophony of five gunshots, and silence. The young man was lying on the ground in a pool of blood, blood staining the wall behind him and the bullets adding to existing pockmarks in the concrete.

* * *

Even someone with no family still had someone who could be taken hostage to pressure them. Sometimes, it was friends or coworkers or neighbours. Sometimes, completely random people. But there were always ten people shot when someone successfully escaped the District. It was an unstable time. While a sizable portion of the population had been pacified by the announcement of the Quarter Quell, glad that their children were not in danger for a year (especially glad were the eighteen-year-olds who had found themselves out of the Reaping a year early), many had drawn the opposite conclusion.

Rebel groups had increased their activity. Rumour had it that in Eight, production had mostly stopped for a while following a wide-scale riot. Nobody told Carl anything concrete, but gossip filtered through. From Head Peacekeeper Katz down to Carl himself, the force ran on gossip. Official orders said nothing useful. Keep it up, crush the Rebel threat with the severest measures. All familiar platitudes.

Carl put up several posters around the little town, covering up the old ones. He was part of a tiny force that policed the scattered farms, which was an impossible task. How were they supposed to watch over every single person in such a dispersed territory? It was easier in the town proper, but it was just a shabby collection of buildings where the Peacekeeper barracks was the most noticeable feature.

Carl put up the final poster and stepped back, reading it. One Bari Thornhill, a twenty-year-old seasonal worker, had run away from Nine three weeks ago and the Peacekeepers had given up on the pursuit the previous day. She had been from around these parts, but had no family or known associations. For that reason, ten random names had been picked out of the files. All of them were twenty-year-old female seasonal workers from around these parts. The old posters had threatened execution for these ten women, who were being held in a jail in a larger town three hours’ drive from here, if Thornhill did not return. The new ones proclaimed that justice had been carried out, even though the hostages would only be shot that evening. 

Several hours later, Carl took aim at a young woman. They were all silent, having cried all their tears long before, but they still stared at the Peacekeepers with mute pleas in their eyes. There were ten executioners and ten hostages. He had no choice. Carl shot the woman in the head.

“It’s all the fault of Thornhill,” he complained shortly afterward in the barracks as he filled his cup to a quarter with the local grain alcohol and topped it up with water. The ten had been given the rest of the day off to recover from carrying out the execution. “If she hadn’t run, none of those ten would have been dead.” Carl drank the mix, cringing at the burning warmth. “Damn, that’s good.”

“Yeah,” grumbled Zaz, already on the way to being quite drunk. “Can’t they see they’re just making it harder for themselves in the long run?” The short woman’s Capitolite accent came back when she had too much to drink, and Carl giggled at its funny inflection, as did the others. “You’re laughing?”

“Are you asking a question?” Carl asked loudly, “or making a statement?” The others burst into laughter. Carl poured several fingers of alcohol into the cup and tossed it back in one gulp, coughing. How much was that, anyway? Assuming it was ninety percent alcohol, and most strong drinks were half that, and he had just drunk something like a shot of it - well, never mind that. Carl had more important things to worry about. He grabbed a piece of bread and stuffed it in his mouth. 

The stress was fading away, replaced by a nice warmth. There were four of them in a small circle, eating and drinking. Four more were drinking alone, staring into space. Two had slunk off to their rooms to be with one of those people who gathered outside the back door every night. That was the advantage of small-town duty, you could get your own room. Back in the Capitol there had been as little privacy as in the Academy.

“This is worse than ink,” Mark complained as he knocked over an empty water bottle. “Even Eleven had better drinks than here.” ‘Ink’ was the nickname the cheap fruit wines of Eleven had, as they had the appearance, smell, and taste of ink. Mark took a mostly full bottle of water and poured it into his cup until it overflowed. “Fuck.” Water dripped onto his trousers and shoes.

“Old Rye will clean it, who cares?” Zaz said dismissively as she ate the pickle Chip, the last of their little group, tried to grab. Rye was missing one and a half legs, which didn’t stop him from being an excellent cleaner of anything the Peacekeepers managed to get dirty.

Mark gulped down his drink. “I change my mind. At least this crap will dry without being sticky. ”

Deprived of the pickles, Chip intently focused on the smoked sausage. She tried to cut off thin slices, but her hands were too unsteady. “That’s nice,” she said, stuffing a piece into her mouth. “Try this sausage, it’s amazing.” Carl tried the sausage. It was normal sausage. He splashed more alcohol into his cup and topped it up with water.

“Can someone give me the pickles?” came the voice of Bean. The owner of the voice leaned into the room shortly afterward, wearing uniform trousers and an undershirt. Her hair was messed up despite being buzz-cut, and Carl laughed at the sight. “My man wants pickles. And what are you laughing at, you asshole?” Carl laughed harder.

“Sorry,” Chip said, focusing on the sausage.

“Did you fucking drunks eat all the fucking pickles?” Bean shouted.

Mark sipped his drink.

“Fine,” Bean said, calming down. “Chip, give me that smoked sausage. He’ll like it better anyway.” Reluctantly, Chip handed it over. Bean snatched a stack of bread off the table as well. Her pockets were bulging with cans of rations. “Let me tell you, though, that if Mr. Red-hair stops turning up, you will also be very sad.”

“Wait, _he’s_ here?” Mark demanded, knocking his cup onto the floor. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“Because you can’t even get up out of that chair, much less in bed,” Bean snarked. Chip and Zaz laughed, but Carl couldn’t. He suddenly found himself seized by the gloom that always came over him when he drank too much. As Bean left with the bread and smoked sausage, tins rattling in her pockets, he mixed himself another drink, and another. It was like he was sucking himself into a vortex, forcing himself deeper and deeper. The next thing Carl knew, he was lying on his cot and the sun was stabbing daggers into his head.

* * *

“Move it!” Carl shouted at the cart-puller, who did not move it. She just looked at him weirdly before continuing to walk slowly. Carl fought back a scream of frustration. “Papers!” he commanded. She stopped completely. Stupid local. “Did I tell you to stop? Keep moving!” She resumed moving, and Carl thought there were tears in her eyes. “I said, give me your papers!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

The fucking local just stopped in her tracks like she was deaf or something. Seized with a sudden fury, Carl kicked her in the knee as hard as he could. She went down, snivelling. Then he kicked her a few more times, for good measure. Carl rummaged through the cart, finding a large braided loaf of bread. “Now this is life,” he said, taking a large bite. It was delicious, with so many fruits and nuts and seeds mixed into the sweet fluffy dough, it tasted more like cake than bread. “I might forgive you for not obeying me just now.”

He put the bread in the bag he carried with him just for these occasions and continued to poke through the cart. Some alcohol - that was always needed. A shawl - garbage. He threw it on the ground. Potatoes - useless. Carl kicked over the cart, scattering potatoes everywhere, and glared at the crying local, who was whining about how this had been a birthday gift for her mother.

Carl was seized with a feeling of wrongness. Why was he hurting her? None of this was right. The woman was crying, obviously in pain, and Carl suddenly felt terrible about having ruined her birthday gift for her mother. “Be thankful I’m not going to haul you in,” he said to cover up his awkwardness, and marched off, opening one of the bottles as he went. Guilt clawed at Carl’s chest, but he chased the feeling away with a few swigs of alcohol.

* * *

Carl stood by the edge of the pit, watching with gritted teeth as the Rebels were forced to lie down at the bottom. His squad had been specially driven out here to the outskirts of some village to deal with another village whose inhabitants had aided the Rebellion. The more unrest, the worse the crackdowns - couldn’t they just put two and two together and stop? Carl wouldn’t have had to kill them if they hadn’t rebelled.

An unfamiliar First Sergeant was in charge of the execution. She sat in a folding chair, gun in one hand and bottle with another, and occasionally shouted commands. “Is that twenty?” she asked, looking at the people at the bottom of the pit. Carl could hear them crying. They were of all ages, from the elderly down to a baby in arms.

“Yes, sir!”

“Get on with it, then!” She stood up and personally joined the firing squad. Carl found himself between Mark, who had been steadily approaching collapse for the past month, and a male PFC he didn’t know. One of the roving task forces had been brought in to carry out the operation, but a few local Peacekeepers had been dragged in as well.

Carl stared at the heads of the people, wondering why he was there. They moved around, still alive. Others waited in trucks out of sight. Carl wanted to throw up, but he steeled himself. These people were dangerous Rebels. They had to be destroyed to the last person.

When ordered, Carl took aim, picking a target, an older woman. A cacophony of deafening gunshots, and then silence broken only by the sound of a baby wailing. Everyone looked around, waiting for someone else to do it.

“Oh no!” Mark shouted, dropping his gun, and leapt into the pit. Stepping on the bodies, he picked up the baby and cradled it in his arms. One of its little arms was bleeding from a misaimed bullet. “How could you do this?” he said accusingly.

Carl looked down. 

“Get out of here,” the First Sergeant snapped.

Mark walked away, trying to staunch the blood with his hands. The next portion of Rebels was brought in, with two more babies among them. That execution went more smoothly. Carl was glad to be done with the nasty business. He let the First Sergeant deal with the locals pressed into digging the pit and then filling it up, and went towards the truck.

During the ride back, Mark cooed to the baby, whose arm he had bandaged himself. “I’m going to call you Zlota, alright? For Zaz.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Zaz grumbled as the truck bounced over a pothole. “That’s just what I need in life. And it probably already has a name.”

“So what? I’ll just badger some clerk into changing it.” 

Carl wondered what was going through Mark’s mind. It wasn’t like any of them liked to listen to babies wailing, but it was their job, after all. Mark must have snapped. Some Peacekeepers snapped and drank themselves to death and others rampaged around shooting random locals, so Carl supposed that it wasn’t so strange to have Mark suddenly deciding to adopt a Rebel baby when compared to the other options. Hopefully he’d snap out of it eventually and shoot the damn thing.

* * *

Over the next week, Mark became more and more attached to Zlota. He raided the pharmacy to buy formula and skipped patrol to play with her. The higher-ups tolerated it for a while, but when he turned up to an execution with Zlota strapped to his back and wearing ear protection, their patience ran out. Mark received an ultimatum usually given to female Peacekeepers who had chosen to give birth - hand it over to a Community Home in Two or be honourably discharged and go raise it himself. Unsurprisingly, he chose the second option.

They all saw him off. “I won’t miss you!” Mark shouted from the cabin of a truck that had brought them ammunition. 

“Neither will we!”

Mark held Zlota up to the window, which had no glass. “Wave bye-bye, Zlota!” he said with a smile, taking a still-bandaged chubby hand and waving it. Carl hoped he’d get better eventually.

They got no replacement for Mark, but it didn’t matter in the end. Days after his comrade’s departure, Carl was reassigned to Eight.

* * *

The city sucked, and that was the end of it. Eight’s Centre was a total dump, and Carl suspected that it had always been a dump, even before the rubble from ruined buildings had littered the streets. It was tense. People were going to work, mostly, but it was still tense.

Peeking into an alleyway, Carl saw someone drawing something on the wall. “On your knees!” he shouted. The person ran instead, and Carl shot them without thinking. He jogged up to see what they had been drawing. A large mockingjay. Of course. Carl turned over the corpse, and saw the face of an old man. Strange. Old people seldom skulked around at night, painting graffiti.

“Did you really have to do that?” Richard asked. This was his first week there. “He was just drawing on the wall!”

Carl shrugged. “He was resisting arrest. And that symbol’s punishable by death, anyway.”

Richard looked like he wanted to argue further, but didn’t. Good. They continued their patrol with no further incident. The sun was slowly rising, and Carl just wanted to take off his body armour and sleep. 

Back on base, lots were being drawn for an execution. Reluctantly, the selected Peacekeepers lined up. Carl wasn’t picked, which was a shame, as it would have meant the entire day _and_ upcoming night off, plus decent food, which was always nice, plus booze, which was even better. At least he’d get to sleep now.

Richard was also picked. “Do I have to?” he asked in a trembling voice.

“Yes,” said the sergeant who was to lead the team of executioners.

“I won’t do it.” Richard’s confident words were belied by the fact that his voice sounded like a child’s.

Carl hid his sigh. Now they’d start arguing, and he’d never get to sleep. It was always awkward when someone got insubordinate. Soldiers didn’t talk back to their commanding officers, and when it did happen, it was enough to make anyone feel embarrassed.

“Fine,” snapped the sergeant. “Next hovercraft out of here, you report for reassignment.” In the end, one other person ended up refusing besides Richard. “Volunteers?”

Carl immediately stepped forward, already tasting the free drink in his mouth.

* * *

Everyone with half a brain knew it was long past time to surrender, and yet Carl was still stuck in the basement of a ruined building on the outskirts of some town in Two he had never heard of. His squad, which consisted of six children all under the age of sixteen, sat on the ground in the dusty basement, listening to the sounds of fighting just metres away. Gunshots, explosions, screams. So loud. The air tasted gritty, and it was hard to see from the smoke.

“Fucking mayor should have surrendered days ago,” Carl grumbled for the hundredth time that day as he looked for a target through the holes in the wall above him. “What’s the point of this crap, anyway? The more we fight, the higher the odds they just put us against the wall.”

None of the kids said anything. They wore a mishmash of cadet uniforms and civilian clothing, and their faces were covered with a thick layer of dirt and dust. None of them had helmets or much in the way of body armour. The two eldest looked to be fifteen and the youngest couldn’t have been ten yet, which didn’t stop her from having a little medal ribbon on her oversized uniform. In Carl’s opinion, there was no sadder sight than a medal on the chest of a child young enough to still be playing at war with sticks and paper Peacekeepers.

Trying to stop his squad from rushing tanks with grenades was an ordeal. They didn’t have anything even vaguely resembling an instinct of self-preservation and constantly wanted to go on suicidal charges. They all had some sort of wounds, mostly minor. One, however, had taken a bullet in the left arm, which hung uselessly. He was eleven or twelve years old.

Carl glanced to where two of the kids were sitting on a pile of rubble, staring blankly into space. “Fuck it,” he said. “If someone as much as glances in our direction, we surrender.” The kids looked defiant, but they didn’t dare contradict authority. “Put down your guns and grenades.” They were practically out of ammo in any case, and had a grand total of four grenades, three of which were probably defective.

The fighting intensified. The children cowered in a depression in a corner of what had once been a cellar, and Carl tried to shield them as much as he could. If the roof collapsed or a wall caved in, that would be the end. They didn’t cry, of course. All of them had been in action for weeks now, and had cried out their tears long before Carl had ended up commanding them. A bullet hit the side of one of the holes in the wall. They were directly underneath it, to make themselves harder to see. And what if someone threw in a grenade? Carl mentally swore at whoever had decided that this shitty town was worth anyone’s life.

Slowly, the sounds of fighting receded. Carl could hear footsteps on the street and catch glimpses of soldiers skulking around. Slowly, he stood up and raised his hands into the open. Someone ran over. Two someones, a tan man and a dark woman, both covered in dirt, both pointing guns. Another person hovered a short distance away, holding a small camera.

“Come out with your hands above your head!” the woman snapped. Carl didn’t want to leave the kids behind, but to disobey could have been lethal. Slowly, he crawled out of the hole in which he had spent days. “How many are there?”

“Six more.” The youngest was helped out first. She stared at the soldiers with wide eyes.

“How old are you?” the man asked, staring at the kid with a horrified facial expression. He stretched out his hand slightly, and the child took it and shook it enthusiastically.

“Eight.” She barely reached the man’s chest.

The man sighed as the others climbed up next, the wounded boy needing to be helped up by two of the older ones. “Alright, just walk in that direction, follow the signs, and someone will deal with you,” he said as he finished patting them down for weapons they didn’t have. “Keep your hands on your head!” 

“Let’s go,” Carl said, leading the little group. Hands on their heads, they walked away from the sounds of fighting and eventually joined a little stream of captured Peacekeepers walking somewhere.

“Town’s fucking surrounded,” someone grumbled. “Everyone else packed up and left, but no, not us, we’re gonna have to die to the last person.” Others said the same. The shabby defending force had been mostly old reservists and kids, as almost all of the real Peacekeepers were in the Capitol. 

What a stupid fucking waste. Who even cared about this town? Everyone knew that the war was long decided. Snow should have surrendered instead of throwing children into the line of fire. Not like he ever did anything good for the children. Every year, Two had sacrificed the best and the most willing so that the others would be safe, but it had all been in vain. The little soldiers walking quietly next to him were proof of that. Some of them were crying, as if their surrender was somehow a disgrace and not the fact that they were in uniform in the first place.

After several hours of walking, they reached some sort of intake station. At the first checkpoint, they were separated by age. “Fourteen and over - there, thirteen and younger - there,” someone kept on repeating.

“Well, kids,” Carl said, “we’ll have to split up now. If you’re younger, raise your hand.” Four hands. “You’ll be in charge now, alright?” he said, pointing to the oldest-looking one of them. “Now, my name is Carl Surje. Remember that. Who was your last commanding officer?”

“Carl Surje,” they dutifully replied.

“Very good. I’ll see you later, alright?” He waved at the four as they joined the stream of little children in uniforms walking somewhere. The soldiers guarding them were also bottom-of-the-barrel young, fourteen or fifteen or so. The Rebellion only took kids starting at fourteen, or so he had heard, and it had the decency to keep the underage away from the fighting. He had never seen child-like figures in the line of fire.

“Let’s go,” Carl told his fifteen-year-olds, and they headed off. He could see that they were unhappy at being transformed from the eldest to the youngest. The only thing they could see were backs and the occasional pair of shoulders. He wondered if maybe he should have told them to pretend to be younger. Surely the children would be treated better.

They walked for a while before reaching another checkpoint, where males and females were told to form separate queues. “Male or female?” a sixteen-year-old in a clean uniform asked Carl’s kids.

One confidently said he was a boy and went to join the line, but the other had more difficulty. Even Carl still wasn’t sure, and they had spent days huddling in the same dilapidated room. “I’m not sure,” they replied.

“That’s not what I meant,” the soldier said tiredly. “I just want to know what section you were in at the Reapings. It’s so we can check your records faster.”

“That’s the thing, I’m intersex. Half my slips were in one bowl, and half - in the other. I alternated the section I stood in each year.”

The soldier sighed. “If your last name starts with the letters A-M, line up with the men. Otherwise, with the women.” Fortunately, the kid’s name started with E, so the three of them were able to stick together for now. 

“What was up with that?” the boy asked as they stood in yet another line. Carl just wanted to eat, drink, and sleep for the next year (or, failing that, have a real shower), but he had to stay on his feet. Reluctantly, he opened his mouth to answer.

“They only have two lines,” Carl said. “Intersex people are split between the two based on last name.”

The boy nodded. “Huh.”

Up ahead, Carl could see most of the line being funneled off to sit around on the cold ground, with food and blankets provided. A smaller amount, nearly all of them of actual fighting age, were climbing into an open truck bed. Were they taking the officers for questioning somewhere else? Or maybe there were specific people they had been instructed to look for? Carl knew that detailed reports of atrocities had reached every corner of Panem, and probably half the world too as well.

At the front of the line, more teens stood at a desk and took blood samples. Good thing he hadn’t sent the two with the younger ones. They’d have been found out instantly. “Huh,” the boy said, “it’s like at the Games.”

“Nah, the line’s too short for it to be the Games,” the youth retorted. Carl chuckled. 

The boy went first. “Stone Trevors, fifteen years old, posted to Two, no comments. Go on with the others.” Stone paused, waiting for the other two. “Basalt Enogi, fifteen years old, posted to Two, no comments. Go on with the others.” Carl approached. “Carl Surje, twenty-four years old, posted to the Capitol, Nine, Eight, and Two. To be detained immediately. Get in the truck.”

“What the fuck?”

“Get in the truck before I rip that insignia off you,” one of the soldiers said in a steely voice. Confused and angry, Carl waved farewell to Stone and Basalt before walking towards the truck. Inside, he met more confused people. 

“What’s going on?” he asked nobody in particular.

“Lynch law,” someone said, an older man who looked to be a lieutenant.

“Oh, don’t amuse my slippers, what lynch law? We’re still breathing!” said another lieutenant, a slightly younger woman. “It’ll be drumhead courts-martial, believe me.”

Carl liked the sound of neither alternative.

* * *

The piles of rubble were never-ending. Carl walked around, picked up salvageable materials, and put them into piles. It was boring and repetitive, but it was better than the alternative. He had been held in some sort of detention centre for a few weeks before being sent to Eight to help rebuild, which was infinitely better than being put up against the wall. He stood in what had been a factory in a small industrial town, picking up bricks from the ground and scraping off mortar before stacking them onto pallets.

“At least it’s almost over now,” Risko said. She had been detained and released with him. Carl didn’t ask her about her past, and neither did she ask him. “It’ll be over in a few weeks.”

For months now, everyone had thought that it would be over in a few weeks. It was seeming more and more likely with every week, though. Nobody wanted to continue defending the regime. “Hopefully,” Carl muttered, picking up a piece of pipe. “I’m sick and tired of this place.” It was cold and wet, and the food was shit.

“You think they’ll just let us go?” Risko asked with a snort. “And give up the free labour?”

“You think they’ll go against their own high morals?” Carl shot back. “They could have just shot us all dead.”

Risko shook her head as she pushed aside bits of broken brick and machinery. “There’s a difference,” she insisted.

At the end of the day, what did it matter? They’d have to let him go eventually, and he had no close family or friends back in Shoshoni, where he had worked in a factory as a child, making tools. Carl had zero desire to go back to the assembly line in any case. “I guess.”

A few metres away, someone found a dead body in an advanced stage of decay. With difficulty, it was dragged out of the rubble. A technician was sent for to identify the corpse. Feeling grateful for the subzero weather, Carl continued digging through the rubble. The most he managed to find was a chunk of copper.

* * *

“We’ll need to go through your files,” the clerk said. Carl wondered if it was worth it. He had concealed his past easily enough for now, did he really want to dig it up just for a chance at less-cramped housing? But on the other hand, the case against him had never reached trial. Surely they’d see that.

“Of course,” Carl said, sticking out a hand. The clerk took a blood sample and looked at the screen. His face fell. Carl kicked himself mentally.

“You will need to be assessed by a Depuration tribunal before you can apply for social services,” the clerk said, reaching behind himself and taking a piece of paper from a printer. “Here. Report to this address. It should be done in a few days, and you can keep on working in the meantime.”

At least that was that. Carl had begun to panic that they would arrest him again, but a Depuration tribunal didn’t sound too bad. What was the worst they could do, after all, bar him from things he already didn’t have? Carl left the office and headed for the indicated building. After waiting in line for what felt like an hour, another clerk looked at the paper. She scanned it, gave him another paper, and wrote a time and date on the back of his hand in purple indelible ink. “Be here then,” she said, and waved him on. The next person in line took his place.

He walked back to the place where he was staying. He had eventually decided to return to Shoshoni, banking on the fact that at least people would know him there. Since in Two, all former Peacekeepers and high-ranking civil servants needed to be investigated, he had lain low, working in reconstruction for meager rations and a place to stay, a room with nine other former Peacekeepers in the same situation as him. So far, he had found nobody who recognized him. In desperation, he had even called the Academy he had attended from the age of twelve, hoping for leads on his former classmates, to no avail. Everyone had simply moved around too much. Some had died, some were still missing, others simply hadn’t registered at a permanent address yet.

Carl found himself missing his comrades. He remembered old classmates, old squadmates, former commanding officers. He thought about the kids he had commanded for a few weeks before surrendering. Where were they? None of them had tried to contact him.

Trying to chase away his thoughts, Carl cooked dinner in the impossibly crowded apartment and listened to the others give advice for the hearing. It ranged from bad to worse.

Two days later, Carl walked into a small room, trying in vain to calm himself. Three extremely bored people were sitting at a table, and he was motioned to sit down in front of them. He handed over the paper. “Carl Surje, former Peacekeeper?” the woman at the head of the table asked. Carl nodded. 

The hearing lasted for an hour, but it felt more like an eternity. Carl was pronounced an offender and permanently barred from military and civil service. A part of him was outraged that he was being sentenced just for having worn a uniform, but another part was just happy he was now eligible for a room with three roommates, not nine.

* * *

_Ten years later_

The kids were still kids, and that terrified Carl. Kate was tall and strong, but she wasn’t even nineteen yet, ten years after the fighting had ended. “You were so little back then,” he said, shaking his head.

“We all were,” Stone muttered, sinking into the couch. The six of them had just arrived, Kate being the last one. They barely fit into his tiny apartment. Single factory workers couldn’t afford much.

“Doesn’t seem that way when I think about it,” Kate said, walking across the carpet and looking at the dinner table. “Do you even have enough cushions for all of us to sit on?”

Carl had bought a low table thinking it would spare him from having to keep a bunch of chairs either standing unused or taking up space on the minuscule balcony, which was already crammed with his bike, pots of growing vegetables, and washlines. The fact that he never had to think about potential guests was a testament to his loneliness. His entire social life consisted of veterans’ circles on the Web and the occasional evening at the bar or coffee shop - and he wasn’t even forty yet. “No,” he realized. “We’ll have to sit on the floor.”

“No matter,” Bianca said. He hadn’t even recognized her, or Basalt. They were twenty-two and twenty-five now. Still so young. “As long as the food’s good, it’s all good.”

Stone laughed. “Exactly.” He was taller and broader than Carl himself, as was Miguel, whom Carl had last seen at the age of eleven. Only Gitta still looked much the same as she had back then. Short and skinny, Carl doubted she’d have been able to join the army now.

Kate. Miguel. Bianca. Gitta. Basalt. Stone. When they had served together, he hadn’t even known their names. Now, he knew their names, but they were strangers to him. He sat quietly as they discussed their lives, feeling out of place. It was Stone who had first gotten in touch with him and the rest of them, and Carl began to wish he hadn’t done so. This was completely pointless.

“Let’s eat,” he said, not able to think of anything else.

As they dug into the food Carl had spent the entire day preparing, the conversation shifted to the past. They reminisced about Academy training and combat, and Carl finally began to relax, even speaking up from time to time. 

“This cake is great,” Miguel said after taking a large bite. “As was everything, really. That salad with the peppers was the best I’ve ever had. Where did you learn to cook?”

Carl shrugged. “I followed the recipe. It’s easy enough to do anything if you do what you’re told.”

As they ate dessert and drank tea, the conversation shifted to the hard years after the Rebellion. The youngest three had found themselves in Community Homes and treated like orphans instead of veterans, and the older ones had eked out a miserable existence just like Carl. While they had all found their families again, it had taken them months or even years. Carl envied them, but looking at their youthful faces, he could feel no anger. Just sadness.

“Could you come around again later?” he almost begged as the meal drew to a close, dreading the prospect of being all alone again with only the computer for company. “Or at least give me your email addresses.”

There followed a flurry of offered phone numbers and email addresses, as well as promises to drop by sometime soon. Carl tested out the phone numbers, feeling a little bit better about himself for the first time in years. When they said their goodbyes and left, he felt oddly fine about it. Carl turned on the television to fill the silence and began to wash the dishes to the sound of warfare in some other part of the world, feeling like things could definitely have been worse.

**Author's Note:**

> As you can imagine, Carl will go to his grave insisting that he was a soldier who did his duty and Mark will tell Zlota with his dying breath that he simply found her somewhere and decided to adopt her.
> 
> Judge Lophand is inspired by Alexey Krivoruchko [surname literally means ‘lophanded’], who is a Russian judge known for having never acquitted anyone. The legal system used in Russia has way less acquittals than the one used in the USA (and thus in Panem) in general, but Krivoruchko is still on a different level entirely. He is in fact under sanctions because of his role in the Magnitsky affair.
> 
> Dr. Fisher appears in my other stories and is loosely inspired by German anti-Nazis who ended up as defense counsel representing Nazis (so not a specific person). 
> 
> Yes, it is very unfair that Carl lives on pretty well for a few more decades as if none of the horrors he was responsible for happened. Perpetrators do tend to die in their own beds at the age of 90.
> 
> This is what Carl’s squadmates could have looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_the_military#/media/File:ERP_combatants_Perquín_1990_35.jpg  
> https://i.redd.it/wk9jahcx5cy41.jpg  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_in_the_military#/media/File:SPLA_Child_Soldier.jpg  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spomenko_Gostić#/media/File:Spomenko_Gostić_screenshot.png  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragoljub_Jeličić#/media/File:Dragoljub_Jelicic.jpg
> 
> The scene of Kate shaking the soldier’s hand was inspired by this photo: https://i.imgur.com/ikPMoKr.jpg  
> And this is what she would have looked like when assigned to the front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momčilo_Gavrić#/media/File:Momčilo_Gavrić_i_major_Stevan_Tucović.jpg


End file.
